MMOs and game design

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racing

One of the things that happens when a lot of players are going after the same objective, whether it’s a quest mob or a crafting node or anything of that ilk, is that people tend to get more competitive.

In WoW at the moment, if you log on at peak times on a busy server, you’ll often be waiting around with other players for a quest mob to (re) spawn. And people handle this in different ways.

I’ve played games in the past where players politely queued. Sometimes people will turn it into a race and see who can target and hit the mob first when it appears. Sometimes people will start inviting everyone into a group so that everyone can share the kill (this is the smart way to proceed really). On a PvP server, there’s often a bloody killfest to sort out priorities.

So if someone invites you to a group when waiting for a boss to spawn, accept the invite.

I was more amused last night when we were dogpiling on some mob whose name I forget, and one of the alliance foolishly turned on their PvP flag. (Argent Dawn is a PvE server so you can’t attack other players unless they do that, but as soon as you do you will get flagged too.) In short notice, everyone in the vicinity was flagged for PvP and the alliance got slaughtered. Then once the numbers were thinned so that the remaining people could actually see each other, we invited the other hordies to a group and got the mob jointly.

But despite all the talk about sharing kills and horde powah, I have an admission to make. I kind of like racing other people to mining nodes and quest NPCs. Especially when I can charge in and tag something quickly.

But shamans and paladins – when you target the ground area with an AE DoT? That’s totally cheating :P

Screenshot of the Day

I may be the only player who doesn’t like the worgen starting zones. Too much “go here, kill 10 x, now go here, kill 10 y” for me – the goblin area is much more fun.